Summary

X-ray crystallography has met the 1-hour photo shop. The technique used to take days or weeks to determine atomic identities and relationships in a reasonably sized molecule. But now there's a new generation of x-ray diffractometers with a difference: a chip called a charge-coupled device (CCD), whose two-dimensional array of pixels—each acting as an independent detector—allows hundreds of x-ray reflections to be gathered at once. The results: structure analysis in just a few hours.